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When a child develops a fear of math, homework time can become battle time! But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Setting up a comfort zone for a child who is struggling with math anxiety can be relatively simple and it can help to ease the fear and discomfort the child feels when required to focus on math homework, despite feelings of fear, frustration and even anger towards it.

The first thing you want to establish is an area that the child feels comfortable in. This should include a comfortable chair and desk that is easy to sit at and reach their book and other materials. You may also want to place some potted plants and/or a fish bowl around the work area to make it less ‘school like’ and more inviting.

You’ll also want to provide something, other than their work or a blank wall, to look at. The best option for this is probably a window. The reason for this is sometimes when a student gets stressed about the work they are doing a small distraction like looking at a blue sky or the world outside makes them feel a bit less trapped (and looking outside can be quite calming especially if there are trees or clouds to look at).*

In addition, it’s also helpful for your and your child together to create a poster or a white board/chalkboard that has information related to what the child is working on in math on it; such as equations, facts, hints and foundational skills for what they are currently working on. This helps them by not thinking they have to pull all this information from their heads and gives them a helpful reminder of what they need to get their work done.

If your child is inspired by inspirational quotes or stickers those are good to include as well. Also make sure to use colours that the child likes and have a calming influence on them (blue and green are good colours to use, try to avoid red where possible). **

You also want to make sure that there are opportunities for the child to take ‘brain breaks’ that allow them to process the information they are learning and avoid becoming overwhelmed. These breaks can be looking out the window, colouring something (colouring has been shown to have great calming properties), breathing exercises/mediation or doing some sort of physical activity (jumping jacks or a silly dance are my personal favourites).

These breaks shouldn’t last more than a few minutes (5 at the maximum) and it needs to be established right from the start that they are not to be used to avoid doing the work but can be used if the child starts to feel overwhelmed.

Study groups can also be a good idea. If there are a few kids in the neighbourhood bring them together (even if they’re not in the same grade level). This does require a bit more supervision to keep them on task and ensure everyone is being supportive, but the group encouragement and experience can be really helpful if all the kids are working on math homework together. It takes the loneliness out of the equation for a child with math anxiety and older children can sometimes help explain concepts and provide encouragement.

The important thing to keep in mind is that math anxiety is real and it affects your child’s ability to not only do their homework but also to process the information they are being taught or should be learning from their homework. Not to mention it can make homework time feel like battle time; and no one looks forward to that!

With just a few steps and an understanding between you and your child that math anxiety is real and you recognize they are struggling with it, it can remove some of the embarrassment they may feel and frustration making math, and math homework time, more enjoyable, interesting and even fun!

Notes:

* You may be thinking, I can’t place my child in front of a window as they’ll just stare out of it and not get any work done, orthey’ll just take advantage of the ‘brain breaks’ to waste time so they don’t have to get the work done, and this can be the case sometimes. However, most of the children I’ve worked with over the years have indeed, at first, taken advantage of the ‘free distraction’ to avoid doing their homework, but once they feel comfortable in the space and that these breaks are there to help them when they get frustrated, they’ll likely be more apt to try doing their work instead of just staring out the window or taking breaks. If you do find that it is a continuous issue you can put a time limit on it or put a curtain over the window and limit the break time to a minute or two as needed.

Like this:

What if we looked at learning math like we look at learning how to read? How differently could we ‘read’ the world if we knew math as a language? What type of stories would it tell?

When learning to read the English language we start with the simplest part, the letters. Twenty-six symbols that each stand for a specific concept, each one meaning a different thing.

We teach someone learning to read what each letter is, what its name is, how to pronounce it and what order it comes in the alphabet.

Then, once they have that mastered, we start putting the letters together into simple combinations that we call words. Some of these words are just the sounds of the letters put together:

c + a + t = cat

Some of the words contain sequences of letters that when put together make a different sound from their individual letters:

t + h = th
c + r = cr
s + h = sh

Then there are the ever elusive vowels and the rules surrounding what they sound like when they are on their own, versus when two are put together, or when an ‘e’ sits at the end of a word. For example the ‘a’ sound:

fat ≠ fate

But eventually we get that down and then we start putting the words together into sentences, where we give them context with nouns and verbs and adjectives and adverbs.

Finally these sentences come together to form paragraphs and then novels and papers and website blogs like this one.

Once we know the letters and how they go together to form words and sentences and paragraphs we can then read and this opens up a whole new world of possibilities. Suddenly we can learn just about anything our mind can imagine, even more so with today’s access to the internet and its whole online world.

Not only can we learn from reading but we can dream, fantasize, escape, visit worlds that don’t exist in the ‘real world’.

Not only that but we can use those words to communicate our own thoughts and ideas, dreams and fantasies.

It’s amazing to think that all that came from just those twenty-six little symbols!

Now, what does this have to do with math you might ask. Well what if instead of letters we now had numbers. Let’s put those numbers together with some other symbols (called operators) to give us equations. You know like 1 + 1 = 2 or Euler’s identity

Well, what’s now stopping us from putting those equations together into theorems with axioms (a true statement) and then creating proofs.

Those proofs can then be used to describe, and validate, the world around us.

All of a sudden we’ve created an entirely new language that describes the world around us in a whole new way.

What type of a world can we now ‘read’? What new adventures could we go on with this whole new language at our disposal? How different would the world now look?

It’s amazing how similar learning math and language could be. Yet most math is taught very differently from language in a number of ways. Often it is taught isolated from other parts of the subject. You learn numbers first but then you learn equations separately. Then you memorize those equations to apply them to areas called trigonometry or calculus.

It’s typically not taught on what’s called a connected scaffold, and that means that a lot of the connections are missed along the way. These missed connections lead to missed understanding, which leads to frustration, anxiety, fear and even hatred of math as a subject.

Maybe it’s time to take a different perspective with how we approach this rich and beautiful subject so we can start to ‘read’ the world in a different, more mathematical, and more fascinating, way.

Like this:

How many times have you heard the above statements from friends, family, your kids, or maybe even from yourself?

It seems, more and more, that math has a bad reputation in today’s society. It is not uncommon to hear a random person on the street, one of your friends, or even yourself speak about how much they hate math, how they aren’t any good at it, or how you need to be ‘super smart’ to do math.

In our society it would be almost unheard of for someone to speak the same of reading or writing. You don’t hear people proudly stating ‘I can’t read, I’m totally illiterate’. In fact, hearing someone say that would most likely be a prompt for you and others to offer your help to them, to immediately explain to them how important it is to be able to read and write, and how anyone can do it, they just need some help, guidance and support.

So why then has mathematics gotten such a bad rep?

A lot of it stems from a pre-conceived notion in our society that mathematics is only the information taught in schools (fractions, algebra, trigonometry) and that they are ‘useless’ in the real world. When will I ever use SOH-CAH-TOA in the ‘real world’? Or that there are only small portions of math that are useful in the world around us (think about figuring out the tip or the tax).

Many people see mathematics as simply a collection of numbers, formulas and things to be memorized for the next test.

But imagine if we saw math in a different way?

What if we saw it as a golden spiral in a sunflower…

…or in the notes of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto…

…or in the buildings all around us?

What if we looked at math not just as a collection of numbers and formulas that could be easily input into our calculator/smartphone but instead we look at it more like a language, one that, if understood, could explain so much of the world around us.

It requires a change in perspective, but just think of how amazing the world could look to you if you took just a bit of time to see the mathematical world all around you!